Why Anarchists and Libertarians Can’t Get Along 5

by • Anarchism/Anti-State

A reader writes:

“Very thought-provoking posts today, Keith (and great talk with Antony from the other day, on the state as aberration).

I agree that it’s a shame how wide the gap is between lefty anarchists and an-caps (and each camp’s fellow travelers). My feeling is a lot of that can be chalked up to the larger red/blue culture war trap, as well as quite a few instances where (if one looks closely) both sides are basically agreeing but merely prioritizing different issues to such an extent that they end up misreading one another as mortal enemies, rather than potential allies. Both view the other’s potential success as empowering what they deem to be the worst elements in the society (corporations, racists, and social conservatives on the one side; radical SJWs, communists/socialists, and immigrants/cultural aliens [sometimes explicitly non-whites and Muslims] on the other). There is also, of course, the simple communication problem of various groups using seemingly mutually unintelligible political languages each laden with their own wonky terms and ideological histories.

I think it was during that talk with Antony that you mentioned how the red and blue tribes have difficulty conceiving of separation of culture and state (to perhaps the same degree that people in Europe centuries ago had difficulty conceiving of separation of church and state). I’d never thought of it quite in those terms before, but that seems very accurate. The ironic flipside of that reality is that various ostensibly anti-state camps fall into the same trap: they want anarchism with red values, or blue values, and can’t tolerate the thought of co-existence with anarchists who’d want to arrange their societies differently than they themselves would. They’re still, as you put it, universalists. With the predictable end result that too many in the various anti-state groups, despite what they may theorize or envision for some idealized future — in practice just end up throwing their lot in with either the Republicans or Democrats as the lesser of two evils (as they see it), and are thus neutralized and incorporated back into the statist fold.

As someone who came of age at the height of the so-called libertarian moment in the late 2000s/early 2010s, it’s been disappointing and disheartening watching the an-cap/libertarian sphere implode and dissipate, with many getting sucked into the alt-right (or at least, against the SJWs), some into the SJW left (or at least, against the alt-right), and probably not a few just disengaging entirely. That’s not to say the libertarian sphere has necessarily shrunk a huge amount (though admittedly I myself am not too involved in it anymore), but it’s clear that the energy and passion (and numbers of activist-type youth, frankly) are much greater among both the rising progressive movement and the alt-right/alt-right adjacent disgruntled mobs. Neither of which I have much faith in to move us toward anything resembling a freer society.

By and large, they each seem to just want to gain hold of the cudgel of the state to beat the other, out of fear of being beaten themselves should the other get it before they do (in other words, politics as usual). And that fear limits their vision for what could be possible.

There are some silver linings. I’ve noticed that a few people in the progressive camp seem to be genuinely anti-war/anti-empire (supporters of Tulsi, Mike Gravel, and the more radical left supporters of Bernie). They do exist. But will it be enough in comparison to the mountain of progressives who are either apathetic about empire or enthusiastic supporters of it (under the guise of humanitarianism and “anti-fascism”)? Probably not. And of course, as you’ve pointed out, Bernie’s foreign policy views and priorities are problematic at best. He has spoken out strongly against US support for Saudi Arabia and the Likud government, so that’s a plus. But Obama as a candidate was also against the Iraq War and Gitmo.

Things could get interesting if both Tulsi and Gravel end up on the debate stage. But both could also be easily discredited in the eyes of most Western leftists (and in the case of Gravel, much of the public at large). Oh, Tulsi hated gays and likes Assad? Gravel is a 9/11 truther? Conversation over. It’s unfortunate, and it says a lot that that’s where we’re at.

Truth Time: Marxism is Stagnating Reply

by • Uncategorized

A great takedown of the old guard Communist parties AND the First World Left by Unruhe. The one thing I disagree with Unruhe on is that I don’t consider the old guard Commies to be moving toward fascism, much less “third positionism,” but toward bourgeois nationalism (in fact, they’ve already been there for a long time, with Putin and Xi being the most obvious examples). And the critique of the embrace of academic leftists gender studies ideology by Western Maoists is spot on as well.

The Empire of Faux Liberalism Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy

A Facebook reader offers some interesting insights about the nature of the present global empire, and empires generally. It is true that empires are often more culturally “liberal” or “progressive” than the societies that they subjugate and conquer. Alexander the Great spread the Hellenistic culture throughout the Ancient Near East. The Romans were certainly more advanced and more of a cosmopolitan culture than many of their backwater provinces. The European colonialists were frequently more liberal than the conquered peoples of their empires (for instance, the Spaniards largely put an end to the Aztec practice of human sacrifice and the British outlawed the suttee). Napoleon was something of prototype for modern liberal imperialism. It was the American empire that ended emperor-worship in Japan.

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We Are All Julian Assange!: An Anarchist Soliloquy Reply

by • Uncategorized • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

These are the days, dearest motherfuckers. These are those days. These days. These days of rage. These do or die days. These all or nothing days. These days with the ice caps melting and the seas rising to drown their wayward children. These days with the empire collapsing all around us in heaps of flames like the glowing red spires of a thousand Notre Damme’s. Days of hysteria and blindness. Days of gnashing teeth and talking heads decapitated from the reality they pontificate upon. Days of drones strikes and indefinite detention. The end of days for the worlds most abominable superpower, exit stage right. But the actors in this epic tragedy are revolting. Swing low, sweet cherry, Helter Skelter is coming down with a fight. Nero’s finale is rapidly becoming a concerto. In days like these, truth has become a precious commodity. The kind of glimmering prize that even the better angels of our nature are tempted to horde. But sadly sometimes even horded prizes can be taken for granite. Washed away in the rapids of filth that can only be called “truth” in parentheses.

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Washington State Politicians Drop Cynical Attempt to Impose Taxes on Gold & Silver Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations • Tags:

Sound Money Group, In-State Dealers, and Grassroots Activists Deter Tax-Hungry Politicians

By J P Cortez

Well, here’s some encouraging news…

Efforts in Washington State to impose sales tax on gold and silver were SHUT DOWN today thanks to intense efforts by the Sound Money Defense League, a group of in-state coin dealers led by Dan Duncan, the Association of Washington Businesses, and a large number of vocal grassroots supporters.

Here’s the backstory…

Since last month, a few misguided Washington State senators and representatives have been trying to ram through a new tax on constitutional money.

Their cynical efforts stalled out last month on the senate side, and today, the House Finance Committee voted decisively against imposing a new sales tax on precious metals.

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Keith Preston: US has been at war throughout most of its history Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags:

Press TV. Listen here.

The United States has been perpetually at conflict with other nations throughout most of its history, following the expansionist tradition of past empires, says an American political analyst in Virginia.

“We had the War of 1812, the Mexican war, the Civil War, the wars with various Native American nations (tribes), the Spanish–American War, the two world wars, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, Iraq twice, Afghanistan, just to name some of the major ones,” said Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com.

“We also have to consider all of the different wars that the United States has played an indirect role in terms of either engineering coups or arming insurgents or funding a particular state that is engaged in a war against its domestic population,” Preston told Press TV on Tuesday.

“When we add all of those wars, we see that the United States has literally been involved in wars in probably hundreds of different countries and territories over the past couple of centuries,” he added.

PressTV-US ‘most warlike nation in history’: Jimmy Carter

PressTV-US ‘most warlike nation in history’: Jimmy CarterFormer US President Jimmy Carter says America has only enjoyed 16 years of peace in its 242-year history, making the country “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.”

Former US President Jimmy Carter said Sunday that America has only enjoyed 16 years of peace in its 242-year history, making the country “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.”

Speaking at his regular Sunday School lesson at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, Carter said the reason for most US wars was Washington’s tendency to force other nations to “adopt our American principles.”

Carter said that China, in contrast to the US, had made massive economic progress by maintaining peace. “How many miles of high-speed railroad do we have in this country?” he asked.

The US has “wasted, I think, $3 trillion” on military spending. “It’s more than you can imagine. China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. In almost every way.”

“And I think the difference is if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure you’d probably have $2 trillion leftover. We’d have high-speed railroad. We’d have bridges that aren’t collapsing, we’d have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of say South Korea or Hong Kong,” Carter told the congregation.


AnPrim On Fire: Human Supremacy Within Anarcho-Primitivist Narrative 4

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Environment

By Ria Montana, forest & wetland rewilder https://veganprimitivist.wordpress.com/ 

Within anarcho-primitivism plays an ongoing dialectic pinpointing origins of the problem of civilization. Impugning only capitalism or the industrial age is much too timid. From the left, radical environmental activist leader and author Derrick Jensen impugns the point people exceed their capacity for self-sufficiency, the dawn of cities. In the trilogy Ishmael, The Story of B and My Ishmael fiction writer and civilization critic Daniel Quinn renders agriculture as humans’ dichotomizing choice to be Givers or Takers. Couple city settling with plant cultivating & animal herding and you’ve hit the collective anprim sweet spot.

Looking farther back than agriculture as the start of humans’ split with nature slashes approval. Anarcho-primitivist author and Anarchy Radio host John Zerzan’s look back to origins of art and language has appealed to some but with less enthusiasm. In his 3/13/19 radio show Zerzan reals in analysis on the catalyst of controlled fire, instead positioning civilization’s birth at the point humans domesticated animals and plants. Some say focusing at this fixed ~10 millennia point paints too simple a picture, ignores all civilizations’ embers heating up, culminating to ignite the world ablaze.

Techno-Fire

The debate on civilization’s origins parallels the debate on what qualifies as a technology. Values connoted by technologies are biased to support the interpreter’s view on origins. For example, those who blame agriculture see the plow as an obvious tool of civilization. Those who include controlled fire in the blame see hearths uncovered in archeologic digs as technological shifts in humans’ relationship with living communities that set the stage for domestication of plants and animals. Agriculture-blaming purists deny that using fire is technology toward civilization, perhaps to justify keeping fire in their rewilding repertoire, or perhaps in an effort to ward off criticism of hunting and cooking animals. In the premise set forth here placing civilization’s origins with the beginnings of human primate’s colonizing lifeways, inventions such as mortar and pestle are not catalysts toward civilization if they are not used as colonizing instruments, but spears are catalysts toward civilization if they are used as colonizing instruments, no matter the complexity of design. (Yes other species use hunting implements, but not in a way that degrades and massacres large scale living communities in a mega-regional and eventually worldwide colonizing schema as humans have.)

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Reasons not to take the Julian Assange story at face value 16

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags: , ,

By Adam Ormes

News from Nowhere

Witnessing the uniformity of the popular response to Assange’s removal from the Ecuadorian embassy demonstrates that precious few commentators are willing to discuss the numerous ‘red flags’ in his story. It would seem therefore that it is this reluctant sleuth’s duty to lay them out.

There are perhaps 5 main points to consider here:

  1. Assange’s connection to ‘The Family’ child LSD brainwashing cult – which was very likely an intelligence operation. Substantiating evidence for this claim is provided below.
  2. Assange’s hacker alias, which he used from the age of 16, was Mendax – meaning ‘liar’ in Latin. He was caught after a police raid in 1991, and charged in 1994 “with thirty-one counts of hacking and related crimes. In December 1996, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five charges (the other six were dropped), and was ordered to pay reparations of A$2,100 and released on a good behaviour bond. The perceived absence of malicious or mercenary intent and his disrupted childhood were cited to justify his lenient penalty.” [link]
  3. Assange’s relationships with US government. “On the 17th of November 1994, Julian Assange replied to an email from NASA employee Fred Blonder(,) the UNIX toolkit coordinator at NASIRC (NASA Automated Systems Incident Response Capability). (…) Someone from Los Alamos National Laboratories (mcn) was copied on the email (identity unknown). Also copied on the email was Quentin Fennessy from Sematech. SEMATECH was formed in 1987 as a partnership between the United States Government and 14 U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturers.” Likewise, his former hacking comrade Pieter Zaitko, who went on to work for BBN Technologies, a DARPA military contractor, claimed that Assange’s “graduate work had been funded by a US Government grant, specifically NSA and DARPA money which was supposed to be used for ‘fundamental security research’.” This was subsequently revoked; however it begs the question as to how and why such funding was obtained in the first place. [link]

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The Strange Success of Russiagate Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies • Tags: ,

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

It was the popcorn fart heard round the world. After two years of the vilest Russophobic hysteria seen since McCarthy was hauled off to a laughing academy in a straight-jacket, Robert Mueller, patron saint of butt-hurt Dems and indefinite Muslim detention, came to a conclusion on Russiagate only stunning to those of us who don’t live outside the bulletproof walls of stone blind denial. After 37 indictments for totally unrelated Beltway scumbaggery. After $26 million of the taxpayers pilfered dollars flushed down the fucking toilet. After five hundred thousand hours of unhinged sore losers like Rachel Maddow giving Alex Jones a run for his money screaming their bloody heads off about one grassy knoll after another. The results of the great Russian Inquisition of 2019 are bupkis, notta, zero, no collusion whatsoever between one Donald J. Trump and the Putin regime. You could have heard a pin-head drop at MSDNC.

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In America, talk turns to something not spoken of for 150 years: Civil war 4

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies

By Greg Jaffe and Jenna Johnson

Washington Post

At a moment when the country has never seemed angrier, two political commentators from opposite sides of the divide concurred recently on one point that was once nearly unthinkable: The country is on the verge of “civil war.”

First came former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, a Fox News regular and ally of President Trump’s. “We are in a civil war,” he said. “The suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future is over. . . . It’s going to be total war.”

The next day, Nicolle Wallace, a former Republican operative turned MSNBC commentator and Trump critic, played a clip of di­Genova’s commentary on her show and agreed with him — although she placed the blame squarely on the president.

Trump, she said, “greenlit a war in this country around race. And if you think about the most dangerous thing he’s done, that might be it.”

With the investigative report from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III said to be nearly complete, and with impeachment talk in the air and the 2020 presidential election campaign ramping up, fears that once existed only in fiction or in the fevered dreams of conspiracy theorists have become a regular part of the political debate. These days, there is talk of violence, mayhem and, increasingly, civil war.

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Turkey has been moving away from American paradigm Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags: ,

Press TV. Listen here.

Turkey has been moving away from the traditional American paradigm, a political analyst in Virginia.

Keith Preston, chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com. said Turkey was gradually moving away from the traditional American paradigm and heading in a different   direction leading towards Russia.

PressTV-‘Turkey moving away from US sphere of influence’

PressTV-‘Turkey moving away from US sphere of influence’Turkey has been moving away from America’s sphere of influence and improving its relationship with Russia, says a political analyst in Virginia.

Preston told Press TV that tensions between Turkey and the United States especially rose when Donald Trump became the US president.

Preston said since the Trump administration came to power, there is clearly some tension between the United States and other traditional US allies in NATO.

He said a number of issues were the reason for the tensions.

One reason noted by Preston for the increased tensions with Washington is Ankara’s decision to purchase a Russian missile defense system.

“Turkey and the United States are now having a conflict over the question of Turkey’s acquisition of weapons from Russia,” Preston said.

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Fuck the Border 6

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

Well, he finally got what he wanted, dearest motherfuckers. That vile crusted jizz rag we call a president has finally managed to manufacture an actual crisis at the border. After months of saber rattling conspiracy theories about secret jihadists and child actors, after years of demonizing people escaping the shitholes that Uncle Sam dug himself in the killing fields of the Northern Triangle, the grand swarms have finally arrived, too great in number for even the Donald’s enemies on the fake news to ignore. Naturally, Trump is playing up this tragedy as vindication for all his racist wolf-crying but the sick reality is that it’s likely largely the result of it. A self-fulfilling doomsday prophecy for the MAGA era.

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Jill Stein: Rachel Maddow is “Brain Dead” 2

by • Uncategorized • Tags:

Former Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein returns to PRIMO NUTMEG to discuss a plethora of controversial subjects. Dr. Stein answers questions about Venezuela, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, third-party politics, the corporate media’s RussiaGate smears against her, the details of her appearance with Vladimir Putin at the 2015 RT dinner in Moscow, the Green New Deal, cancelling student loan debt, and whether or not she is running for President in 2020.